German Recon Breakthrough

German Combined Arms Attack in 1941

Back to WW2 Early War skirmishing with IABSM 3 this time. The scenario had a German combined arms team consisting of a panzergrenadier platoon supported by mortars and 50mm AT guns, a PZ IVD platoon, and a mixed recon platoon trying to break through the Russian defenses, which were centered around a village. The Russian defenders had a platoon of infantry, a light mortar section, two 47mm AT guns, and a T-34/76 platoon that moved on board at the start of the game. The Germans had to exit the recon platoon off of the Russian starting board edge for a victory or take the town for a draw. The Germans moved much faster than anyone anticipated and the recon platoon tried to sneak around the edge of the town and into the clear. However, they encountered the T-34 platoon moving on board and after one of their armored cars got knocked out, proceeded to move into the town, where they ran into a Russian infantry platoon trying to deploy! This set off a major firefight that saw the Russian mortar sections and a squad wiped out for the loss of another German recon vehicle. The PZ-IVs moved up and began to engage the T-34s and the anti-tank guns that ambushed them. After several turns each side had a few vehicles burning and it looked as if things were heading towards a draw when the game was called. This was our first game of IABSM 3 in quite some time and the length of the board, number of players, lack of infantry, etc., made us use more armor than we probably should have. The armor system, while a lot of fun, does force you to do a lot of rules checking to see how they fire aginst buildings, AT guns, etc., so it bogged the game down a bit. I also had forgotten many of the rules and even though I had read through them again before play started I missed a lot of things that unfortunately skewed the game greatly.

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